The UTSA Last Lecture

University Center Retama Auditorium, Monday, February 24th at 7:00 p.m.

The University of Texas at San Antonio Office of Student Life and the UTSA Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society invite Professor of Psychology Mary McNaughton-Cassill to deliver the 2014 "UTSA Last Lecture".

The event is an opportunity for chosen faculty to share their accumulated wisdom, speaking to students and colleagues as if this were their last chance ever. This format has become a widely appreciated tradition at universities across the country as a way to move past discipline-focused discourse and bring campus communities together to consider personal perspectives on the bigger-picture aspects of life.

Professor McNaughton-Cassill has entitled her talk "Lifetime Guarantee Not Included".

For more information and accommodations please contact The Student Leadership Center at 210-458-7967.

2014 Mary McNaughton-Cassill, Professor of Psychology

About Mary McNaughton-Cassill

A recognized authority on the subject of Stress, McNaughton-Cassill last year published "Mind the Gap: Coping with Stress in the Modern World." Dr. McNaughton-Cassill received her Ph.D. in 1991 from the University of California, San Diego- San Diego State University Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology, with an emphasis on Behavioral Medicine.

Professor, Associate Dean
for COLFA

Her research involved Psychological and Psychoimmunological explorations of stress responses among elderly Alzheimer's Disease Caregivers.

She also holds a Master's Degree in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Psychology with an emphasis on Physiological Psychology, where her research involved the study of glucocorticoid responses to stress in rats. She is currently an Associate Professor and the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Affairs for the College of Liberal and Fine Arts.

About the 2014 UTSA Last Lecture:

Mary McNaughton-Cassill's Last Lecture, "Lifetime Guarantee Not Included", will explore death and dying — specifically how modern life in our highly mediated, technological world leaves us singularly unprepared to deal with the fact that we all are going to die.

"We glorify mythical deaths, which Jung and Freud would have said was a way of coping with our own anxiety and ignoring real life ones," she says. "We love action hero movies with lots of death and violence, but we do want the good guys to win. We revere athletes and adventurers who take risks and survive, and feel badly when they don't. But these mediated, vicarious experiences are far removed from the reality of life, death and dying."

A recognized authority on the subject of Stress, Professor McNaughton-Cassill teaches Psychology and last year published "Mind the Gap: Coping with Stress in the Modern World."